The Kennedy Detail: JFK's Secret Service Agents Break Their Silence

We're thrilled to have these people here, Jerry Blaine, the author of Kennedy Detail, Clint Hill, one of the special

agents

who was here in Dallas at the time, and the writer Lisa McCubbin, Lisa is the one who put all of these stories together and the from many of the other

agents

, so welcome to Dallas and welcome to the museum on the sixth floor, thank you, thank you, um, I need to remind people that we need you to turn off your cell phones, not just put them on silent, but put them on silent. turn off There are many things. of radio interference in the Dealey Plaza area and we want to make sure the recordings come out well.

There are two cameras here, which are C-span. The show is being taped for C-Span and they will air it at some point, probably in the next week or two. We don't have an air date yet and Stephen Fagan, our associate curator is taping, also for our oral history program, which now has more than 800 people. As we talk, the biographies of our guests will appear on the screens behind us. Some photographs of the Kennedys also come from the National Archives and White House photographers, and the photographs of the Kennedys you will see in Dallas come from the collections of the sixth floor museum.

Let's see here. We will also have a question. session many of you have already completed the forums if you don't have a pencil or pen to write uh, raise your hand and our people come and give you a pencil to write. Obviously I have some questions prepared, but I know. I can't cover everything um and we'll see what we can do towards the end of the show we'll get into our q session let's get familiar first we like to do that with these shows raise your hand if you remember Kennedy. Murder Weekend Raise your hand if you were here in Dallas at the time Fascinating Fascinating Okay, let's see and I wanted to make a point.

You know we are here for a very sad event, but we don't want this to be a sad occasion, I would like to convey to you a story that occurred to me while I was halfway through the book. It didn't occur to me until I read a passage in the book. Let me take you back to Denver, Colorado and both of you. and clint worked at the

secret

service

office in denver, but not at that time in 1963, i think that was when i saw president

kennedy

and at that time we lived next door to one of the top executives of the local lincoln mercury dealer and he came One day I told my dad and I that President Kennedy was coming to town and we would

service

his limousine.

He will come this way. We lived a block from a major east-west street and I can tell when. They're coming if you go down 6th avenue you'll be able to see them and then wave at them so I walked out and you know there's no one else there because I think the route I was taking. Lowry Air Force Base to downtown Denver wasn't posted so I'm the only one there and I saw the flashing lights and here comes the big limo. I'm sitting there waving and waving and he walked by and never saw it. he lowered his head he was reading something it occurred to me while reading this book that there were

secret

service agents in that car asking me hey how did that guy know and who else knows that there's probably something in the file somewhere that says find out about that kid Alright , your book, the Kennedy

detail

is getting a lot of attention and one of the stories that has been talked about a lot is the moment when Jerry almost shot dead the new president of the United States, Lyndon Johnson.

You were in the White House. house, from there, what happened, well, I was not in the white house, this was around 2:15 in the morning after the assassination and we were all Kennedy agents who were standing guard and President Kennedy, yes He was leaving, he would notify security. command post and we would spread the word that the president was moving the vice president before he became president, he usually only had two agents with him, one was inside and maybe the other outside, so he had no idea about the protocol and I hadn't slept in about 40 hours and I was hallucinating and when I relieved the 4-12 shift agent, he was still emotionally back from Dallas, so he pointed it at the Thompson submachine gun we had at the post and that's how we set them up. everyone there and not knowing if it was a conspiracy or not, we were pretty nervous when I heard a noise coming from around the house and suddenly I had my gun on my shoulder and my finger on the trigger and uh, I know you would notice, but you can recognize lyndon johnson's profile so luckily I notified or noticed it right away but it was close.

I had nightmares about it for a long time afterward, uh, those of you who've been here before, we know where we are, but of course C-span viewers may not know that we're actually on the seventh floor of what It used to be the Texas school book depository building. The building is now owned by Dallas County. It is the Dallas County administration building. the museum has exhibits on the sixth floor and the seventh floor and we are in a separate area it is a saturday afternoon two days from now it will have been 47 years since president

kennedy

was killed right outside these windows jerry and lisa where do you have this? book and why it has taken so long for your story to come out, let me start with the motivation first.

When I retired, I started searching the Internet and I started reading stories about agents that we had worked with who were accused of being part of a conspiracy, the driver turned around and shot President Kennedy, although if you look at it from close, I would have had to shoot Mrs. Kennedy in the back of the head to get to the president at that time and, uh, just smearing stories. people and then I read a story involving tampa where I made a preview and I went back and looked at my records and said it's time to set the record straight, there aren't many of us left and we're all grey. furry and we won't be here for long, so we wanted to leave a record and, uh, find someone.

I must have probably written about seven books to tell the stories, but to find someone who could put

their

heart and soul into the book. Lisa McCovin who wasn't even boring at the time of the murder, but with Joyce, my wife and I were friends with her parents and she graduated with my son from high school, so Lisa, over the course of this, became agent and I think I will let her speak well of her feelings, first of all, it has been an honor and a privilege to have been involved in this project. I feel extremely lucky that somehow the stars aligned and jerry and I have known each other for all these years and it was the right thing to do. moment and when we got together to work on this project and it's been fascinating to me because I was born in January of 1964 and, you know, in history class it seems like when we take history in your junior year of high school We get to World War II and it's May and things are calming down and I've never studied the Kennedy assassination.

You know, of course, I knew that, but I didn't know much about it. What i knew was that when i used to go to blaine's house for christmas eve they always had a big christmas eve party in

their

basement they had these cool pictures of jerry with lyndon johnson and eisenhower and kennedy and I was always fascinated by that, but I was 12 at the time or 16 years old, I never felt comfortable asking him about it, so working on this book I feel like I have a unique window into history like no one else has had. This was your first book.

I know you have been a journalist for much of your life. professional life was this your first book this is my first published book while I was reading the book I realized where you were taking me and sometimes when you read books like that I mean it's not a little annoying, but with your book I was enjoying getting there, I knew what you were going for and what you were going for and it was an emotional moment and it was nice to follow, how that, how that path meandered, how you decided to write the book the way you did, um well.

As Jerry said, he had spent many years putting together stories and had already been in contact with many of the agents, so he had a lot of material to work with in terms of all his various stories and together we came up with the idea of ​​how to put together the history and for me what was really fascinating and what was important in this book was to show these men as human beings, not just these nameless men with no faces and dark sunglasses, for me the secret service agents were always very creatures. mysterious and you. As I got to know them, I realized that they are human beings and the stories that I read from the different agents and when I started interviewing them were so moving that it was really important to me. make the reader understand who these men were and love them and understand the close relationship they had with the Kennedys so they know what is going to happen in the book.

Everyone knows what's going to happen, but you want to know. you know where you know now you're starting to worry about jerry blaine and you want to really know where he's going to be when this happens so i wanted to build that drama into him clint you were kind of reluctant to get involved you've shown up. Very rarely over the years, more than most other agents, but how did you get involved in this book and how did Jerry convince you? Well, I've known Jerry since 1959. In fact, he replaced me in Denver when I transferred. to the white house and he called me one day and asked me if he would be willing to contribute to a book he was writing and he told me what it would be about and I wasn't excited at all, he was very apprehensive. about this because I've been offered so many opportunities to write books, help get books on TV, various things and I just didn't want to do it, so he told me this book was going to be factual, no salacious information, no gossip. the information would come from the agents that were involved and the material they had and then he said I could verify it once he said that, so I agreed to contribute as long as I could verify it before it was published, which I did. and I have read the book six times and I know what is in it and it is fact, not fiction, you mentioned lewd material and part of Kennedy's legacy is the conversation about his personal life, there is not much of that in your book, why is it as well?

We in the Secret Service give the president and his family as much privacy as we can when they get to the second floor of the White House, which is where they live, we stay out of there unless we have to go. they are asked to go there, what happens on the second floor, that is their business, not ours, the same goes when they reside away from the white house, we provide them with an environment where they can function safely, but they live their lives as they do. we want to live them, we don't interfere and we don't talk about it for several months after the murder, you continued with your task, which was jackie kennedy, um, at some point people reached out to you, like after Life magazine came out. frames from the zapruder movie where they could see you running towards the car, they approached you and said: are you that guy?

That rarely happened, because I tried to make sure no one knew who he was, but I stayed. with Mrs. Kennedy and the children for a full year after the assassination until November 1964 and then I was returned to the White House. Did that make it easier or harder to deal with what had happened? That personal relationship with Jackie made it more difficult. because I had to go through the grieving process with the family but her and the children Christmas of '64 was an absolute horror because here we are with these two little children who just lost their father and the widow who just lost her husband and you Trying to make it as happy and Christmassy as possible, but it's just impossible.

Did you stay in touch? After that, when I left in 1964, they threw me a farewell party in New York, where she was living at the time. us, she had moved to New York and I was living in a hotel room in New York and they wished me well, they thought they were going to transfer me to Muddy Gap Wyoming because they were sure they would never let me go back to the White House having been with the Kennedys, I saw her in 1968 when I attended Senator Robert Kennedy's funeral and I spoke to her several times on the phone because of the interest she had in the protective activities surrounding her children and that was the extent of it.

I assume that the three of you talked to many of the current and former agents at the time about this project, what those conversations were like, and what kind of responses you got, especially from those who didn't want to talk or participate in this project. Well, that's where I really started by calling Jerry Baines' wife and Jerry had passed away and he was our agent in charge and I talked to her and told her I was thinking about doing that. The second person I touched base with was Floyd. boring, surprising probably to many of you, but we never talked about the murder to each other after the murder happened, there was no trauma counseling, there was just a ton of work to do, so they let us do the work and our work life was 60 hours extras a month on average, I think I figured it out, we made about a dollar eighty an hour and uh, we were just constantly working and you were working and the only way toto relax is to take an hour or two after you finish and spend time relaxing or drowning in the agents you were working with and so we kind of swallowed the emotions that we were wrapped up in the new president and we had no idea the impact that was going to have in us for the rest of our lives, but there were two agents that I spoke to but they told me they didn't want to participate and one was Jack.

Reedy and I had a lot of empathy for Jack Reedy because he was on the side of the president's car and when he heard the first response he turned and looked up from where the shot came and at Clint to explain later as his eyes scanned. When he finished, he noticed that the president's hands were going to his throat, so Clint left immediately and Jack then turned around and you know, with all his might he wanted to jump out of the car, but the driver of the car that was following him had stopped and Jack even tried to do it, he would have been hit by the car, but then there was a movie and Hollywood has had a great impact on all of us in the line of fire they had the figure of Clint Eastwood stuck where Jack Reedy was in the car follow-up and the theme of the movie was that he failed miserably at his job and that was the theme of the movie.

You know, I'm speculating, but I think that's probably what shocked Jack and he just emotionally said that he couldn't. A second agent, Don Lawton, who was assigned to do the outbound preview here in Dallas, was not involved and we were so short of agents on this trip that it will probably be another question, but Don was a senior agent and a senior agent was needed to handle . a departure, so he was left behind, he may have seen movies in which some of the theorists say he was told to retire. It was Don's turn to run next to the car and he knew he was going to have to stay there, but not be there.

Being able to be with the president in Dallas that day really impacted him. One of the things that comes out very clearly in the book is the daily routine of the agents, who spend endless hours, day after day, just standing and looking, and how do you do a job like that sometimes? You're looking at sewage out there saying, Damn, what did I waste my four years going to college on? But the rest of the time we did it. You know our agents were prepared. -technology we used hand signals among ourselves we did not have radio communication we had three by five cards with photographs of people who had threatened the president and on the back of the three by five card we had their biography and so on and we memorized those photos and so people always asked us why we wore sunglasses because behind the sunglasses your eyes can look left and right and if you see one of the guys then you hit the side of the car and the other officers do that and you make a fast lap that way they keep an eye on it and if you feel the threats there, you notify the driver to move on, but that was our technology, so is it okay for the general public to know that it's us now?

It had a budget, I think in 1963, of 4.5 million. I don't think we had that much, but we probably had 330 agents. There were 34 of us in the White House

detail

. There were two agents on the first lady and three agents on the children. today they have a conservative budget of 1.4 billion and have around 3,500 agents and 7,000 employees as an organization so it's a completely different game today but the weaponry is also much better when you get sniper rifles that you can headshot a mile away and some of the other technologies and larger groups that use suicide as a weapon, then you still have a serious problem, but I'm sure today's agents have the same heart, that's all. we do, the business is much more complicated now, that makes me wonder: did you have to show the manuscript to the secret service before it went to the publisher?

So why don't you grab one? I'll talk about that. No they did not. I have to get approval for this from the secret service, however, we did it. Jerry let me pick up a book and talk to director Mark Sullivan about it and he read the book and called me and was very excited about the book. He invited us to come to his office and have lunch with him last Monday, which we all did, and he indicated that he thought all new agents in the service should read the contents of the book because it would help them understand exactly what had happened. in the past and they could use that information for what they are doing today and I should add that Clint notified director Sullivan while we were writing the book, I wanted to let him know that it was being done and at first he was what he said he said oh no, not another book, but then he said that he found out that Clint was involved and said that if Clint Hill is involved, we don't have a problem with that, we know he will be trustworthy.

You did mostly security work, but you lived for a while here in the Dallas area. Were you here when it first became known that there would be a Kennedy assassination museum here in town? No, I worked for IBM for 27 years, started and left. in July 1964 and ended up working in intelligence and law enforcement systems and helped design the FBI's national criminal information center, the wallet system for the CIA, and mobile terminal fingerprint scanners. My frustration and I think one of the reasons I left was because it almost seemed like a useless job unless we had the kind of equipment needed, so I worked quite a while on it and made a call to the secret service because the FBI system could search for wanted people and we had no way to keep track of them. where were these potential threat cases, so they had a new data processing manager in the secret service, so I said, well, why don't you connect with the national crime information center and do the investigations and if you get a result in At least you'll know where they are and he said, well, that would be an invasion of privacy and after going through the murder, I couldn't stand it, so I went into the security side of IBM and here in Dallas I worked. for Oracle International and you already had the museum up and running pretty well back then and Clint you stayed with the service for a while, but then you retired and took care of your personal situation, fix what kept you busy.

Since then, well, I tried, I tried various businesses and it would have worked, but I was a failure, so I stayed busy with my family, that's the only thing I've been able to do. Recently, but I stayed in the service, I was returned to the White House detail in 1964 and assigned to then-President Johnson. The first thing that happened was that President Johnson went to his ranch in Stonewall, Texas, and I was there and one. One day I was walking between the house and the security room and President Johnson saw me and recognized me from having been in the Kennedy detail.

He had met him personally in New York. He came to visit Mrs. Kennedy one day at the Carlisle Hotel to find out who. I was, and as soon as he saw me, he called and spoke to the agent in charge, Rufus Youngblood, and told him that he wanted me removed immediately and that he didn't want me to be assigned to that detail with him because I've been with the Kennedys. . and he thought for sure that I was loyal to Kennedy, so Mr. Youngblood came in and talked to him and after about 30 minutes convinced him that I should stay, so I stayed and finally, in three years, I became the agent in charge of his protection and When he left office he asked me if I would be willing to come to his ranch and lead his protection team and I told him that I didn't think my professional career should end at the Bernalis River, so he accepted my refusal. from going there to take that job and I became the agent in charge of protection for the vice president, then I moved to headquarters and finally I was promoted to deputy director of total protection and then I was retired in 1975. in 1975 that was the interview in one of the first episodes or the first 60 Minutes shows and you got a phone call at one point and I know this is in detail in the book.

This was the moment when you first spoke on camera about Kennedy's assassination and people have remembered it since then of course now it's on YouTube everywhere people ask you a lot about that appearance and what do you tell them about that good moment they ask me about that because it was one of those situations where I completely broke down emotionally uh 60 minutes I actually recorded it twice the first time they recorded it everything went well when they returned to New York apparently Don Hewitt, who ran 60 minutes, didn't care I liked the way they did it because I didn't get into my emotions enough, so Mike Wallace called me and said, "Hey, we're having some technical problems with that thing, we're going to have to film it again," so I met him for lunch at a hotel in Washington and they filmed.

I did it again and this time the questions were quite different than the first time and he got right into my emotional baggage and I broke down on camera. Many times people have asked me about that and I'm sure I have recovered and yes, I can say that it was indeed cathartic for that to happen. I'm glad it happened the way it did because that was the first time I really let go of that emotional baggage that I had stored inside of me and you had another moment where you and your wife returned to Dealey Plaza in 1990. agents have an organization called the association of former US secret service agents that held a conference in san antonio and my wife and i decided to go to that and i decided since we were in the dallas area i didn't tell anyone this, but we were going to go to dallas from san antonio and that i was going to go to daily plaza.

I hadn't been here since the assassination in 1963. So we came to Dealey Plaza and I spent some time. walking from Houston to the helm looking at all angles looking at the trees how much they had grown what was different between 1963 and 1990 looking at the situation the way the school book depository was situated in relation to the streets you went up to the sixth floor you had Just it it opened as a museum at the time and I looked out the window to see what the view was and I realized how close it was uh it was a very easy shot and I walked out realizing that I did what I could that day that I could.

I haven't done it again and it was a sense of relief for me to know that I had done everything I could have done. You heard three shots. Three shots all came from the same place. Equally spaced or different. Well, first I didn't listen to them. The second shot, so I only heard two shots. The first shot came from my right butt and I was looking to the left, toward the grassy area on the left side of Elm Street, when I heard the shot, my vision took me to the right, that way. I fired as I did so, my eyes scanning the back of the president's car.

I saw him grabbing his throat and he started to stagger to the left of him. He didn't move much but started to go to the left of him. I knew something was wrong, so I jumped. the car and I started running towards the presidential car trying to get there in time to get on top to take cover because what we're trying to do is take cover and evacuate and I was trying to get there to take cover so that no one could do any more damage. to the president or Mrs. Kennedy when I got to the car, just before I got there, the third gunshot that I heard and felt because it hit the president in the head, right above the right ear, right up here, and the blood and brain matter He was vomiting everywhere, even on me, at that moment Mrs.

Kennedy got up from her seat and climbed into the trunk of the back of the car, she was trying to retrieve something that had come off the president's head and left. to the rear right. I slipped at first trying to get into the car because Bill Gribble the driver accelerated the car I regained my balance I got into the car and helped her back to her seat when I did the president fell to her left on her lap and I could see the top right side of his head, a big hole the size of my palm, looked like someone had taken a shovel and scooped out brain matter just by throwing it around the car and there was blood, brain matter and bone particles all over the car. uh their eyes were fixed, I was pretty sure it was a fatal wound, then I turned to the car following me and gave it a thumbs down to let them know it was a terrible situation, the driver accelerated the car we were going towards Stemons Highway.

I pulled over to the side and passed the lead car driven by Chief Curry, Chief of the Dallas Police. The advanced agent was in the car with him and we were yelling at him to take us to a hospital and he did. he fronted the car and he took us to the nearest hospital, which turned out to be Parkland. According to the book and some of the interviews I've seen, you're convinced that there were three shots, one hit the president, one hit Governor Connolly, and the third shot hit and killed President Kennedy, that's correct, you know, that's in Contradicting the Warren Commission, they concluded that the first shot hit Kennedy and Connolly, the second shot missed and hit a bystander nearby, and the third shot killed him.

I recognize it, butTwo of us believe the second shot hit Governor Connell. The other person he believes is Nellie Connolly, who was sitting right next to him when he was hit, so I think I'm good company in believing that the second shot hit the The governor's third shot was a fatal winning president. I think there were two mistakes that the Warren commission made: They didn't call Sam Kinney, who was the follow car driver, or Emery Roberts, the shift leader, because Sam Kinney had to be on the lookout. constantly in the presidential limo and sam saw the three shots find their target and emery saw the three shots find their target unfortunately they weren't asked to testify lisa, it must have been surprisingly difficult to keep up with facts like these and try to separate the facts from uh some of the dumb stories out there how did you do it um it was a lot of long days um uh jerry and I talked about this a lot because I read something or I read reports and I said jerry this contradicts what you're telling me or what you're telling me is saying and I came to realize that these were the guys that were there and their memories are so vivid and so clear and as I talked to other agents they corroborated the stories and I realized that this is the truth and the other people who They're writing these other reports. and all these researchers who have studied this endlessly were not there and you know there are so you can take some of what is written but what I believe is that what these men have told me is true, I promise we would do a q a um I already have a lot of questions.

If you still need to complete one of the cards, please do so. If you need something to write, raise your hand and our people will come. Here's an interesting one. It's hard eh, this is the goal, this is for jerry, you're saying you're spending a lot of time promoting the book, so how is your golf game the same as it was before you started promoting? And I can also tell you that it is not. That's good, so if you guys are 99 sure there was a conspiracy, what could that one percent be? Well, no, I would say one hundred percent.

I think any good investigator realizes that a conspiracy in which one or more people or two or more people participate in a crime probably lasts 60 days at most. 47 years have passed and there has been no evidence of a conspiracy that has been proven there are no proven facts uh there is a lot of speculation but then they just ignore the Facts I went through all the volumes of the Warren commission and read them and found nothing. I felt like a real injustice was done when the House assassinations select committee studied and investigated several of the conspiracies and finally said, "Okay." we couldn't find evidence of a conspiracy, however we now believe there was a conspiracy, if that's not a confusing solution for a lecture I don't know what is, here's a question we get a lot here at the museum, why not ? the building, that is, the book depository, why it was not secured and which buildings posed a greater threat, but that really goes to the heart of how you did your job and the public perception that the agent made the

break

through here won the loss and uh I I think everyone in the detail agrees that there wouldn't have been a better agent than Winn.

He was very specific about it, but we go back to 34 officers and we had 11 experienced officers who left the two months before the murder, so we had to take them all. of our experienced agents and we postponed them in advance and in case Toby had to go to secret service school and Walt Coghlan was in Miami and then went to San Antonio, so we had all our resources, there were usually only about five agents with the president at any time except if there was another function we were going to and then one of the agents says that the 4 to 12 agent shift would cover the day shift agents so I would probably have 10 there, but with five of our agents.

The job was not to go after a murder, a murderer, our job was to cover the president and evacuate him from the area and I have to comment on Clint's skill that day the vehicle was going 11 miles per hour there were 85 feet. For Clint to catch up, he basically ran about 15 miles per hour to get to the presidential car and he got there after the third shot. There was no way anyone could have done anything to save the job that day. This question was just passed to me. and it's part of one that concerns me because he has questions about some of the events of that day, the question is written was uh, where were the secret service people located in dealey plaza?

Without talking about the caravan, where were they in the square? oh sure we didn't have officers in the square at all, everyone said this was the ideal place because of this isolated building, but you look at the county jail and the courthouse across the street and the other buildings, there was nothing unusual in this. and you know there wasn't always air conditioning at that time so all the windows were open and there were people hanging out of them and we didn't have the resources. Wynn had done most of the progress himself and then along came Dave Grant. to help him finish the last three days, so he has to depend on the local authorities and the local authorities did not have the resources.

I mean, we all knew that the mobile platform that, by the way, the president traveled with the top open preferably everywhere. He went only if it rained or if the wind blew and Mrs. Kennedy accompanied him without a hat and that was the only time she put on the bubble top so we knew we had that isolation or that exposure problem and even the The night before, the President Kennedy spoke to Kenny O'Donnell and Mrs. Kennedy and she asked him questions about protection and he said: You know it would be very easy to kill the president just by shooting out of a window, but this is a democracy, we didn't have the resources and the resources In fact, they were the same ones they had after the Blair House shooting and we didn't have any kind of threat or attempt against President Eisenhower, so that's one of the things that changed as a result of Dallas. presidents don't travel in open cars yes, that's right, I had the opportunity at our lunch to take a look at President Obama's car.

I barely had the energy to open the door. It's not Obama's car. The secret service car is prepared for the president of the United States, who succeeds. to be in president obama clinton make sure you know let's take your service clinton were you going to add something while jerry you mentioned about this this particular building why this building was secured where the windows open or close we went down main street all the windows they were open and all the buildings on main street people were hanging out of the windows people were on the balconies people on the roofs of the wolves which building should we have secured on main street or on the corner of houston and elm just go to have a safe building, how about the rest of them?

So you just couldn't do it, right? However, the public perception is that you check all the windows, but in reality you don't. There's no way at the time that we couldn't do it today. different, there are ways they do it, they do checks in various areas when they have a caravan, of course they don't travel in an open car either, right, um, let's look at a great question, how well or not did all the agencies work together and did they share? information at the time that's probably the answer right there, well, we did it, we had pretty good cooperation with all the government agencies, including the FBI.

I won't say anything bad about the office, they did the best job they could, uh, there was a foul. exchange of information at times, but for the most part there was good cooperation between the secret service, the FBI, the CIA, you name it, nsa, we were all in this together and we all helped each other on the problem in this case, like me. The best I understand is that Oswald wasn't really on anyone's list, he didn't have a history of violence, right? And you know, just because he didn't like some of Kennedy's policies that he freely adopted, he doesn't put anyone on a list, well, he was you.

I know the FBI talked to him because it's his defection, but he didn't really have the kind of background that would make them notify the secret service that he could be a threat. One of the questions that frequently arises is. What was it? Was the limo driving too slow? Was there a minimum speed you had to stay above? Is there a regulation that says you can't make a sharp turn like the one in Houston onto Elm Street? Are they all of those? in the manual and the guide no no there are no guidelines like that and it's been one of the misconceptions uh that was a hard turn they did here and I've heard comments from witnesses saying the car stopped and I think One Of the big mistakes, if you watch the Zapruder film at natural speed, you'll see how quickly it happened.

It happened in less than six seconds. The first sound that sounded different to Bill Greer and Roy Kellerman in the front seat. Bill wondered if he. He had had a blowout so he pushed the pedal really fast to see if there was stability in the car but if you watch a zap rooter movie you don't even see the car slowing down and now you can do it, it was hard to make the turn because it's a turn bigger than a 90 degree turn, when you come out here, you'll notice that the Elm turn or the Houston turn into Elm is a pretty tight turn and that's a pretty good size car, it doesn't have a big turning radius, so He had slowed down considerably, so much so that the motorcyclists found it difficult to keep their bikes upright while turning and then when we got going, he was trying to hit between 11 and 12 miles per hour, which was what we were doing.

Running when we went down Main Street, unless the crowd was too close to the car, they had to slow down even more, but that's usually what we ran and Kennedy's driver, Bill Greer, hadn't run the route before. arrive with me on Air Force One, but he knew to follow Chief Curry in the car ahead because Curry obviously knew the route which was his instruction. Well, Lisa, it's your first time at Dealey Plaza and what did you think when you first got here? No, the first time. I arrived in January 2009, that's right, or it was this year, this year, this year, 2010.

We were in the middle of writing the book and I said to Jerry, you know, I've never been to Dallas and I. I think I'd probably have to go, so Jerry, his wife Joyce and I came here and it was really invaluable and I'm sure my comments were the same as everyone else who came there. You say, "Wow, he's so much smaller than me." I ever imagined it was and um and then going up to the museum on the sixth floor and just seeing how Clint said the shot and how easy it was and how close everything was now the trees are a little taller and more mature than they were in 1963 .It just gave me great insight into how to describe the situation and try to give the reader an idea of ​​what it was like for those people who haven't been here, as I assume most readers have. t so they feel like they're seeing everything as the agent saw it because, as mentioned, this was their first time on this route and, you know, they didn't know what buildings were around the corner, only the advanced agent had been here. and I knew the lay of the land, well, I have a question here that sort of refers to something that bothers me and if I could, gentlemen, I could ask you to speculate one of the really interesting stories is that within a minute after the shooting, A Dallas police officer, Joe Marshall Smith, ran into the parking lot toward the grassy knoll and stockade fence area and encountered a man and Smith had his gun in his hand.

He met a man who identified himself and showed some credentials that he was from the secret service. and yet there was no secret service man on the ground who could have any idea who that person might have been. I mean, clearly, he had some identification that looked official to the officer. Any idea of ​​what he might have been. He had no idea. I know I'm going to have to keep digging, right? I can't help it. He was not a secret service agent. No, you could be sure of that. If there were no agents in the area other than the motorcade, they had a story. someone passed on the story that someone had lost their ID and so the secret service republished in 64 new commission books that is absolutely false, so President Kennedy's car was stripped down to the chassis and rebuilt and it was, I guess , I assume, bulletproof and/or at least less bullet resistant and was used by President Johnson.

Did he ever comment about having to ride in that car? Not me. I was in the front seat when he was in the back, so he never told me anything about it. How did you feel? That car, it was a little emotional knowing that it was a car in which the murder event had occurred, but as you say, it had been dismantled and was now armored. I can't remember exactly what, how, what force. of the armor was but it was enough uh that wasthe first armored vehicle that the secret service owned after the assassination where the secret service tried to locate an armored vehicle for the president's use and the only one they could find was the one that was being used by j edgar hoover, who coincidentally belonged to al qaeda, which It turned out to be a car that had been used by Al Capone, so we got that card, we called it 150, it was the number on the car, uh, it was very lightly armored, barely.

It couldn't, uh, stop a gun, but at least it had some resistance while you were putting this book together and searching your mind to find the information and the stories. Has it been useful? Was it painful to go through all this okay? painful from the point of view of uh, I traded mostly on the Internet and I found that I wasn't really touching the elements that I wanted to, so I started using the phone and you know, five minutes or a question would turn into an hour and a phone conversation of 15 minutes and suddenly I started to detect the emotions and the difficult thing was to get the emotions out to the people who carried that burden all the years, they were buried deep inside me and I discovered it as without In trauma counseling, everyone handled this in a way different, but it really had an impact on their lives.

Lisa came across an article in the US today that said that 18- to 29-year-olds, 82 percent believe it was a conspiracy and you know, I realize that. People don't like to think that a president can die at the whim of one individual, but there were some circumstances that arose. I think one of them slowed down the zap rooter movie because everyone created a story, but this is what I call a blame society because people come up with the theory and then they blame that lousy right or that lousy left, or it was the blacks or the hispanics or cuba or russia or organized crime uh it's a sad tribute, you know, when you look at something like in chile where the miners were trapped they didn't ask to hang the mine owner or bring in a government agency and say let's get these people out of there, this is how we used to operate and I think when president kennedy was assassinated it was the end of the age of innocence, so you asked what do we want to do with this book, first and foremost, what Jerry just said was the most important point, but for me I felt that it was a heart

break

ing and moving story of people who were a band of brothers and they all told me that all these guys there were a very small group of men and they spent more time with each other and with the Kennedy family than with their own families they ate together they slept together they played together they worked together and they were a group of brothers and for me that was a very important point to include in the book.

Another question here. Some people wonder if the book will be made into a movie, but there is actually a television special. Yes, Discovery Channel has filmed a documentary based on the book and we actually filmed it here. in Dallas in June of this year and it was a meeting of seven of the agents from the Kennedy task force and two of whom are in the audience, Toby Chandler and Walt Coughlin, and it was the first time that these agents met and spoke. about this incident, so it's a very compelling film and I hope everyone watches it.

It will air on December 2 at 9 p.m. Eastern Time. It was originally scheduled for this Monday night, but it was moved to December 2nd and I would love to see it. For a movie, I think the book cries out for a movie, so if there are any movie producers in the audience, come talk to us. This note can sum things up pretty well. This is from Diana, who writes. Glad to hear it. you are here thank you you did everything you could thank you very much